How to use nouns correctly

What are nouns

Nouns are names. It could be the name of a person, place, thing, animal, feeling, concept, idea, technology anything.

Person: Ram, Rahim, Gulzar, Vishal, man, woman

Place: Delhi, city, Kanpur, Jodhpur

Thing: Clock, mouse, bottle, stapler

Feeling: anger, love, friendship

Types of Nouns

Proper Nouns

A Proper noun is a name of a particular place, animal, person or thing.
Examples:

Capt. Vikram Batra was a brave soldier.

Hyderabad is a fast growing city.

Learning English is an interesting task.

He has a Maruti 800 car.

Proper nouns always begin with a Capital letter. “The” is not used in front of a proper noun unless it is a grand building or geographical feature eg: The Himalayas, The Ganges, The Alps, The Great Barrier Reaf, The Niagra Falls, The White House, The Rashtrapati Bhavan, The United States of America.

As a rule, “The” is not used in front of proper nouns. In almost 99% of the cases, you would not be using the before proper nouns. In very few cases you use the but there has to be a strong reason for using the as mentioned above. If in doubt, avoid using the. Normally, missing the where it should be used is a smaller error than adding the where it should not have been used.

Common Nouns

Common nouns are class names – it is a common name to all members of that class. Examples: city, man, woman, girl, movie, song, country, soldier, hills, rivers, ghosts.

Capt. Vikram Batra was a brave soldier.

Hyderabad is a fast growing city.

Sachin is a great cricketer.

He has a Maruti 800 car.

Abstract Nouns

Anger, love, hate or jealousy are feelings one can only experience and not touch. Similarly, patriotism or sweetness is something that can only be experienced and/or understood – you cannot see or touch them. Such entities are not material – they are abstract.

Such nouns are called abstract nouns.

Collective Nouns

Collective nouns are nouns which refer to a collection or group.

Examples: Army, team, horde, swarm.

A collective noun as a word signifies a group – it is distinct from a common noun. For example, ‘soldiers’ is a common noun while army is a collective noun. Similarly, players is a common noun while team is a collective noun.

Nouns can also be classified as countable and non countable nouns.

Countable and non countable nouns

Several nouns like pen, chair, man, soldier, player refer to things which can be counted. You can have one pen or two pens or thousand pens. Such nouns are called countable nouns.

When you are referring to one piece of a countable noun, you use singular form while referring to more than one, you use plural form.

Plurals of singular nouns are formed according to the following rules:

Some nouns are not countable like milk, water, anger. You cannot have plurals of non-countable nouns. Note that while milk cannot be counted, you can count “drops of milk” – so while two milks is wrong, three drops of milk is correct.

Some nouns are treated as countable as well as non-countable:

Hair – countable when referring to individual strands of hair but non countable when treated as the bunch of hair. Eg: The mysterious envelop contained three strands of hair. Sharma Ji has lost his hair at an early age.

Much is used only with non-countable nouns

Many, several etc are used with countable nouns

Few, Some, more, a lot, plenty of etc are used with both countable and non countable nouns